Mapping Digital Media: Peru

The Mapping Digital Media project examines the global opportunities and risks created by the transition from traditional to digital media. Covering 60 countries, the project examines how these changes affect the core democratic service that any media system should provide: news about political, economic, and social affairs.The process of digitization is still in its early stages in Peru, where the transition to digital terrestrial television (DTT) will not be finalized until 2024 and the impact of online communication, though growing, is still limited.Television and radio remain the most important media platforms and the main tools to access news in Peru. The internet has not caused a noticeable change in the way news is consumed—though it has become the second most trusted source of news, after radio and before television. At least part of the reason for this is thelow broadband penetration—lower than in other countries in the region. A significant portion of internet access takes place through public access points.Also, the general framework of policies, laws, and regulations does not meet the challenges of digitization in Peru. The Master Plan for the Implementation of Digital Terrestrial Television was adopted in 2010 as a Supreme Decree, without debate in Congress. The Radio and Television Law of 2004, the first law of its kind in the country, has been repeatedly amended. While there is constant work being done to improve the legislation, there is still much to do if Peru is to reap the full benefits of digitization

Quality of Information in Mobile Crowdsensing: Survey and Research Challenges

Smartphones have become the most pervasive devices in people's lives, and are clearly transforming the way we live and perceive technology. Today's smartphones benefit from almost ubiquitous Internet connectivity and come equipped with a plethora of inexpensive yet powerful embedded sensors, such as accelerometer, gyroscope, microphone, and camera. This unique combination has enabled revolutionary applications based on the mobile crowdsensing paradigm, such as real-time road traffic monitoring, air and noise pollution, crime control, and wildlife monitoring, just to name a few. Differently from prior sensing paradigms, humans are now the primary actors of the sensing process, since they become fundamental in retrieving reliable and up-to-date information about the event being monitored. As humans may behave unreliably or maliciously, assessing and guaranteeing Quality of Information (QoI) becomes more important than ever. In this paper, we provide a new framework for defining and enforcing the QoI in mobile crowdsensing, and analyze in depth the current state-of-the-art on the topic. We also outline novel research challenges, along with possible directions of future work.Comment: To appear in ACM Transactions on Sensor Networks (TOSN

Digital copyright law: exploring the changing interface between copyright and regulation in the digital environment

This thesis seeks to address and clarify the changing interface between copyright law and other forms of regulation in the digital environment, in the context of recorded music. This is in order to explain the problems that rightsholders have had in tackling the issue of unauthorised copyright infringement facilitated by digital technologies. Copyright law is inextricably bound-up with technological developments, but the ‘convergence’ of content into a single digital form was perceived as problematic by rightsholders and was deemed to warrant increased regulation through law. However, the problem is that the reliance on copyright law in the digital environment ignores the other regulatory influences in operation. The use of copyright law in a ‘preventative’ sense also ignores the fact that other regulatory factors may positively encourage users to behave, and consume in ways that may not be directly governed by copyright. The issues digital technologies have posed for rightsholders in the music industry are not addressed, or even potentially addressable directly through law, because the regulatory picture is complex. The work of Lawrence Lessig, in relation to his regulatory ‘modalities’ can be applied in this context in order to identify and understand the other forms of regulation that exist in the digital environment, and which govern user behaviour and consumption. By combining his work with that of other scholars in the field, a bespoke ‘Lessigan’ framework is formulated to address and analyse those other regulatory factors in conjunction with actions undertaken by rightsholders to secure their copyrights in the digital age. The thesis will analyse the effect such reliance on copyright law may have on these regulatory influences, and the creative potential of the digital environment

Highly intensive data dissemination in complex networks

This paper presents a study on data dissemination in unstructured Peer-to-Peer (P2P) network overlays. The absence of a structure in unstructured overlays eases the network management, at the cost of non-optimal mechanisms to spread messages in the network. Thus, dissemination schemes must be employed that allow covering a large portion of the network with a high probability (e.g.~gossip based approaches). We identify principal metrics, provide a theoretical model and perform the assessment evaluation using a high performance simulator that is based on a parallel and distributed architecture. A main point of this study is that our simulation model considers implementation technical details, such as the use of caching and Time To Live (TTL) in message dissemination, that are usually neglected in simulations, due to the additional overhead they cause. Outcomes confirm that these technical details have an important influence on the performance of dissemination schemes and that the studied schemes are quite effective to spread information in P2P overlay networks, whatever their topology. Moreover, the practical usage of such dissemination mechanisms requires a fine tuning of many parameters, the choice between different network topologies and the assessment of behaviors such as free riding. All this can be done only using efficient simulation tools to support both the network design phase and, in some cases, at runtime

Impact of the Covid 19 outbreaks on the italian twitter vaccination debat: a network based analysis

Vaccine hesitancy, or the reluctance to be vaccinated, is a phenomenon that has recently become particularly significant, in conjunction with the vaccination campaign against COVID-19. During the lockdown period, necessary to control the spread of the virus, social networks have played an important role in the Italian debate on vaccination, generally representing the easiest and safest way to exchange opinions and maintain some form of sociability. Among social network platforms, Twitter has assumed a strategic role in driving the public opinion, creating compact groups of users sharing similar views towards the utility, uselessness or even dangerousness of vaccines. In this paper, we present a new, publicly available, dataset of Italian tweets, TwitterVax, collected in the period January 2019--May 2022. Considering monthly data, gathered into forty one retweet networks -- where nodes identify users and edges are present between users who have retweeted each other -- we performed community detection within the networks, analyzing their evolution and polarization with respect to NoVax and ProVax users through time. This allowed us to clearly discover debate trends as well as identify potential key moments and actors in opinion flows, characterizing the main features and tweeting behavior of the two communities

Research in multi-cultural relationship building

This study aims to explore the ‘missing gap' between the values of an Accounting firm and the preference shown by Maaori on how they would like to be approached when wanting to build a trusted relationship within a business sense. This study makes use of qualitative approaches in which data is collected primarily through interviews and analysed to produce results and recommendations. The study found that Maaori would like to be approached in a way that makes sense to them and also identifies with their cultural proceedings. It also provides insight into how important trust is when establishing a relationship with Maaori. The study recommends that further studies conducted should interview a wider variety of focus groups to add different elements to this research and that FIRM A's small business department's offerings do not align with what Maaori want so need to be rethought to adapt to Maaor expectations

Expanding the education role to narrow the audit expectation gap: exploring the expectation gap’s existence among accounting students

Society perceives and expects more from auditor’s than what auditors can actually achieve. Society has been found to misperceive the role of an auditor, in particular, in regards to fraud, internal controls and going concern issues. Society’s differing perceptions and expectations of the auditing profession is known as the audit expectation gap. This study aims to explore the audit expectation gap’s existence among Wintec accounting students and the effect that education has on the audit expectation gap. This research intends to answer two research questions. First, does an audit expectation gap exist among Wintec accounting students? Second, what is the effect of education on the audit expectation gap? To answer these research questions, 20 Wintec accounting students have been interviewed. Ten students who have received an audit education, and ten students who have not received audit education. Qualitative data was collected from these interviews and analysed using a mixed methods approach. This study found that an audit education exists among Wintec accounting students. This study also found that education reduced the audit expectation gap, in particular, the deficient performance gap and the communication gap. However, while education did reduce the audit expectations gap, it was not eliminated. This study recommends that Wintec provides a more basic auditing education during introductory accounting papers, educating students on the role of an auditor. This study also recommends that education focuses on the practical use of an audit report, to increase student’s understandings of the information in the audit report, and how this information is communicated. Thus, the researcher believes that these recommendations will help to further reduce the audit expectation

He wharemoa te rakau, ka mahue. Maori engagement with local government: Knowledge, experiences and recommendations

This report presents the data, analysis and results of focus group research that explored Máori knowledge, experiences and perspectives of local government in Aotearoa New Zealand. Seven focus groups were held with different groups of Máori; 18 – 24 year olds in tertiary study; 18 – 24 year olds in the workforce; people 25 years old and over residing in rural areas, and people 25 years old and over living in urban settings. The purpose of this report is to present the research findings about the knowledge and experiences of Máori in relation to local government, and in particular, their recommendations for the development of the local government sector. It is intended to assist local authorities in their efforts to improve their engagement with Máori, and stimulate further research with Máori about Máori participation in local government decision-making.A research project supported by the Royal Society of New Zealand Marsden Fund (MAU-039

The Global Crisis and Academic Communication: The Challenge of Social Networks in Research

The global economic crisis is seriously affecting academic research. The situation is provoking some big changes and an urgent need to seek alternatives to traditional models. It is as if the academic community was reinventing itself; and this reinvention is happening online. Faced with a lack of funding, researchers have determined to help each other develop their projects and they are doing so on social knowledge networks that they have created for this mission. The purpose of this paper is to analyze different social networks designed for academic online research. To this end, we have made a selection of these networks and established the parameters for their study in order to determine what they consist of, what tools they make use of, what advantages they offer and the degree to which they are bringing about a revolution in how research is carried out. This analysis is conducted from both a qualitative and a quantitative perspective, allowing us to identify the percentage of these networks that approach what would be the ideal social knowledge network. As we will be able to confirm, the closer they are to this ideal, the more effective they will be and the better future they will have, which will also depend on the commitment of users to participation and the quality of their contributions.Martorell Fernández, SM.; Canet Centellas, FJ. (2013). The Global Crisis and Academic Communication: The Challenge of Social Networks in Research. Journal of Communication and Computer. 10:1031-1041. http://hdl.handle.net/10251/65625S103110411